Ten Years of Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi turns 10. I just finished writing up about the past 20 years of .NET. A post that got a bit of attention. But now I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past 10 years of Raspberry Pi. We cannot look at the Raspberry Pi alone. But, its impact on the creators space has been amazing.

The first Pi was released back in February of 2012. And it had a whopping 256MB of RAM. Fast forward 10 years and we are topping 8GB of RAM! The Raspberry Pi comes in a few form factors based on ones need. From the Pico all the way up to their common form factor or the standard. Each with different set of use cases. From a personal PC to a doorbell cam.

Let’s look at what this has done for access to an affordable personal computer. Giving thousands of people around the world access to PC’s they didn’t have before. Raspberry Pi has opened up the creators space in a huge way as well. How was this possible? It comes down to what the Raspberry Pi gives us. Which is a powerful, low-cost compute boards that are widely available. Want to build an outdoor weather station? Or a small robot that rolls around your house? All and more can be done with a Raspberry Pi.

For us hobbyist we are overly excited on what we have done with these board and what we haven’t yet done with them. We have put many different version of Linux on them. We have turned these into personal web servers. Where I have put a bit of focus is Kubernetes on Raspberry Pis’. But this isn’t just me and I want to denote that. Running a personal cloud on low cost hardware has been a big part of the creator space. I have wrote about this extensively. For the hobbyist this was an insight into what it takes to provision a machine. As a developer me asking for a new machine to deploy my app was nonchalant. I didn’t care about what it took and why would I, I am a developer. My entrance into the creator space around Raspberry Pi opened my eyes to much more outside my own job. I had to now answer questions my infrastructure teams did for me. What OS? What to install? How do I keep this patched? This is now on my shoulders. I found a new respect to my infrastructure engineers and operators.

One of the most important contributions that the Raspberry Pi has given us is a greater creator community. This community has grown to be beyond a few of us putting k8s on a pi or powering our 3d printer. But it helped fuel ideas and added people to it who never would have thought they could do what we have done with the Pi. You can see this in any platform you are on. Search for “Raspberry Pi” and you will find a vast amount of communities out there that fit what you are looking for.

Looking at the past 10 years we have done a lot with the Raspberries. Looking forward I am hoping we are going to get some more compute and RAM at a lower cost. As those who know me know what I will do with this. I am also hoping to see the community grow deeper in other areas of the world we don’t hear from as much.